As the Spanish conquistadores and their colonial descendants – often of mixed Indian and Spanish blood – traveled into the northern reaches of their new domain, their settlements and experiences helped establish a future hybrid culture, which in the contemporary era would be called ‘Mexican-American’. While the Spaniards considered the Americas their ‘New World’, the original residents were virtually wiped out, and their traditions, stories, and philosophies were submerged, often combined with those of the invaders, to re-emerge in safer times. Subsequent cultural expression, in the invaders’ language, would recount a centuries‘-old heritage. New immigrants added to and helped portray the newly conceived culture, and when the region became the United States, the evolving cultural production would often be expressed in the English language.

Literature produced by groups in the US who have emigrated from their original nations tends to fall under the terms of Diaspora, exile, or immigration literature. Mexican-American or Chicano literature, however, possesses the additional sense of occupation, an experience of evidencing the production of a people who have long resided in an area that has come to be called ‘America‘ and the United States. It is moreover the cultural production of merged ethnicities – the indigenous or native to this continent with the Spanish and other Europeans – rendering a unique mestizo or raza consciousness. Thus, Mexican- American literature can be transcultural and transnational as well as North American in nature. Contemporary US Latino literature can fall into categories of ‘native’ writers – those born in the US – as well as those who compose in the country, in exile from their original nations. Mexican-American literature has an additional category, a focus on the recovery of works that were produced in the US before its origin and ethnicity was recognized.

Mexican-American literature also varies from other US Latino literature not only in that it is produced in English, Spanish or bilingual form but also in that it often includes words and phrases from indigenous languages, such as Nahuatl and Maya. It resists the greater US hegemony by incorporating indigenous practices, myth, history, and language. Chicano literature will often adapt terms of Nahuatl origin such as Anáhuac for ‘North America’, or Flor y Canto as the title of a journal or cultural organization (the words in Spanish for Xochitlcuícatl, indicating poetry or literature).